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Foreign worker woes for government and industry

EMILY BOURKE: It's a policy that's been labelled "lunacy" in some quarters and "a reprehensible betrayal" in others and detractors have been labelled "xenophobic".

Either way, the heated debate over bringing foreign workers into Australia to work on mega mining projects shows no sign of cooling down.

The Prime Minister is demanding miners share the wealth, while others in the labour movement are demanding a fair share of jobs for local workers.

The bottom line is that the mining sector needs around 100,000 extra workers over the next five years. The demand for skilled labour is unprecedented and it's not going away.

Trouble is, the normal market mechanisms can't keep up and many Australians don't and won't move to the mining areas - certainly not in the numbers that are needed.

To discuss the sticking points and possible solutions, I spoke to demographer Bernard Salt, Roger Atkin is from the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy and Dave Noonan from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.

Roger Atkin, if I can begin with you. You are from the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy which works with industry to develop their workforce now and in the future and assists young people to start their careers in the resources sector so if you are doing your job, why do we need overseas workers?

ROGER ATKIN: The level investment firm going on just in Queensland let alone around Australia is phenomenal. We've known nothing like it. Yes we want to employ local people and young local people especially but really the supply of skilled people willing to move to the sort of places where the investment is, is very limited. If we don't do this then these major projects which are going to keep Australian going for generations to come just won't get built.

EMILY BOURKE: Bernard Salt, there is suggestions in today's media that the problem is that Australians lack initiative. What are the figures, why won't people move?

BERNARD SALT: Well, in fact Australians have had a great history of labour mobility. We are very happy to move from Victoria to New South Wales to Queensland, particularly to the south-east corner of Queensland and reverse. We'll move north-south along the eastern seaboard but we have for generations had a problem with moving from the east to the west.

In any one year the largest number of people from the east that will move to the west is 7,000. That is total population. That probably makes about a 3,000 person contribution to the workforce. The issue is that the number of people coming into Western Australia from overseas can range up to 48,000 so there is about, people are six times more likely to come into Western Australia from across the Indian Ocean than from across the Nullarbor Plain.

I argue that the Nullarbor Plain is a little bit like a Berlin Wall - it keeps the people from the east from getting into the west.

EMILY BOURKE: Dave Noonan, the union is grappling with a difficult manufacturing sector and there is so many displaced workers in that field, can you simply pick up workers from western Sydney and suburban Melbourne and plonk them in the Pilbara?

DAVE NOONAN: If we look at the real situation in terms of the enterprise migration agreement which was announced last week, it actually deals not with skilled or trades workers and above, it is actually about a minimum of 1,700 workers in what are called semi-skilled areas. This means riggers, scaffolders, crane drivers, plant operators and first of all I think it needs to be understood that the training period of time to train people to those callings is not the same as it is to put someone through a four year apprenticeship.

It is also the case that as we are informed, the likely source countries of labour for these jobs is China, Indonesia and the Philippines. None of those countries have the sort of vocational trading systems that provide the legally certified requirements for those callings.

So my point is that those workers are coming from overseas will need to be trained and certified to work in Australia in any event.

We now turn to the situation in Western Australia and in the south-west regions of Perth itself which includes the Kwinana Strip - youth unemployment runs at around 27 per cent. That is not well known and I think it is often missed in this debate.

Of course we have long standing and endemic Indigenous unemployment and lots of other high unemployment areas in regional Australia.

I think the other thing that is important and as originally a Western Australian who lives in Melbourne, I can say I have crossed the Nullarbor a few times and I certainly understand the difficulty that people have in relocating but I think it is possibly a little colourful to refer to it as the Berlin Wall. I am not aware of anyone being shot for trying to cross it yet.

EMILY BOURKE: Roger Atkin, if I can ask you, the unions are clearly concerned about wages and working conditions and substandard skill sets, can they be guaranteed? Are you concerned about the quality of the skills that might be coming in?

ROGER ATKIN: There is always the question of that but I think the enterprise agreement is robust enough to ensure that that will happen and in fact our information on it certainly in the Queensland Resources Council is that a lot of these people will be coming from Canada but again I acknowledge there the point David made that some of the unemployment figures but you have got to remember in this country there is not a labour shortage, there is a skill shortage and unless we can get our act together and really invest in the future of our skills, we are going to facing this sort of thing constantly.

EMILY BOURKE: Dave Noonan, if I can ask you if this migration arrangement can create permanent jobs for other Australians for the long term, why not embrace a short-term guest worker scheme?

DAVE NOONAN: Because of the way it is currently been designed. Now first of all the union always has had a view that there is a need for a very balanced skilled migration scheme in Australia. I've seen some of the figures from the mining industry suggesting that the union movement is xenophobic and my union is a multicultural union. We are made up of workers from all over the world and I haven't seen very many people from the mining employers with the long history of opposition to apartheid and involvement with the apartheid struggle, the support for land rights, speaking out against the demonisation of refugees as my union and I have done for years and years and years.

So the xenophobic thing, I just wanted to raise and say that it is a little rich to read from a newspaper like The Australian and some of the people who are commentating about xenophobia, it is opportunistic smear which is there to avoid dealing with the real issue.

Now turning to your question I think that there will be some need for skilled temporary migration programs. We have a view that permanent migration, permanent skilled migration is a better solution in balance but there is no doubt, I mean I think there is $170 billion of resources work at the moment that they are going to be some skill shortages but what is not the solution is to have a situation where we have an announcement about semi-skilled workers such a large number, not capped at 1,700 by the way under the EMA, and we have a situation where people with precisely those skills already can't get on.

I mean a major employer, Program Maintenance, on the 7.30 Report the other night made the point that they had advertised for 80 workers for a resource project and received 4,500 applications. Every time an apprenticeship is advertised in the construction, resources or engineering sector, they are swamped with applicants. I certainly agree…

EMILY BOURKE: So what is the obstacle?

DAVE NOONAN: Well, I think that there has been an unwillingness to take on the load of training and I think that that has got to be done. I think that we have to actually really make the priority of training the next generation of young Australians in construction resources an absolute priority.

ROGER ATKIN: If I'd just might make a point about that. I think the biggest barrier actually to bringing on young people and green skins generally if you look at people with no experience of the industry is the capacity to train them and make them safe on the workplace. This is part of the reason why you have this difficulty in getting young people and new people into the industry. Every single one of them that I know that I work with would much rather have a local person working for them with the skills than trying to bring them in from overseas which is a really high cost option for them but if that is all there is then that's all there is.

EMILY BOURKE: Bernard Salt, if I can ask you, this debate has taken on a racial tone. How do you explain that and can the heat be taken out of it?

BERNARD SALT: Generally I think Australians are very, have been very accepting of multiculturalism of a significant migrant contribution to the Australian nation but I do think in tough times that people might over react. I don't see it as a uniquely Australian trait, I think it is something that applies to any community when there are straightened times that people are facing.

EMILY BOURKE: Well Chris Bowen says there are between 10 and 30 other similar agreements under discussion and the reliance on foreign workers isn't new. This has been happening in the health sector for some time. Bernard Salt do you see any drawbacks to this model?

BERNARD SALT: Well, I suppose it comes down to the devil be in the detail as Dave I think has alluded to. That at face value as long as those positions are first offered to Australian workers and if the positions cannot be filled because people don't want to move to the west or for whatever reason then it is an insurance policy for the investors who say at least we know that there is a fallback position, that we will be able to get the labour and the skills.

EMILY BOURKE: Dave Noonan, the Government has pointed to a jobs board that will ensure that local workers get first dibs on the job. It has been described as a political fig leaf. Does a jobs board allay your concerns?

DAVE NOONAN: I wrote to Minister Evans asking for a jobs board 18 months ago and just to address Bernard's concern about the timing, the Construction and Resource Unions have been engaged in a dialogue with the Government about this issue for all of that time. In particular we have sought some undertaking and reassurance that there would be proper labour market testing. In other words there would be a process by which local workers would be sought and if they were unable to be got in the correct skills then we would look at temporary overseas labour with appropriate protections. Now the appropriate protections are problematic. The number of visits by the Immigration Department to 457 employer sponsors over the year 2010/11 decreased by 50 per cent. Only 4 per cent were audited. That is a problem and we are aware of widespread exploitation in this area.

In terms of the jobs board, we think it is a very good start but it needs to be properly utilised, it needs to be properly set up. We've now seen some action from the Government on that space but at the point of time of the announcement of the EMA on the Friday there was certainly a lack of guarantees around this.

EMILY BOURKE: Roger Atkin, speaking from industry what are your thoughts on the guaranteeing of workers' safety and the conditions?

ROGER ATKIN: Look, he's right, it's something that needs to be monitored. I believe we're in a stage now with our companies where they are very, very keen to look after all their workers...

EMILY BOURKE: Is that just lip service?

ROGER ATKIN: I don't think so. I think it's an economic reality.

EMILY BOURKE: Some of these areas though in outback regional areas, they are inhospitable places and there are a lot of problems with fly-in fly-out workers and that model. It can be a pretty miserable existence - what can companies and governments do to improve the lives of workers and their families?

ROGER ATKIN: Well certainly a lot of the companies, and I'm speaking at a general level here, invest heavily into their communities in housing in their communities.

The reality is though if they need, for example, an electrician and that electrician lives, again an example, on the Gold Coast and the kids are at school there, they've got their home there, they've got everything there, their sense of community is there, they're not going to move and uproot the whole family to go to the Mooloolabas or Dysarts of the world, or even the Mt Isas but they still want to participate in the industry, and the industry still wants them. So, for many workers, FIFO is - fly-in fly-out - is an appropriate and a workable response.

EMILY BOURKE: There was an example of Rio Tinto several years ago going to South Australia in the wake of a whole lot of jobs going from Mitsubishi and approaching retrenched workers and saying would you like to come to the WA mining towns and they said no.

BERNARD SALT: And the fact is that some people will and some people won't. Some people have got personal and family circumstances, there are age, there are a whole lot of reasons as to why people may want to fly-in fly-out or actually uproot and move but if we have a situation where even in the suburbs of Perth as I said before, we have got youth unemployment at 27 per cent, if we've got entrenched Indigenous unemployment and other unemployment in regional areas that are very high and we are not doing a serious job of trying to attack that and I'm not convinced we are at the moment. Even Hugh Morgan this morning...

EMILY BOURKE: Well, indeed if you're right, do we lack initiative?

DAVE NOONAN: The CFMU agreeing with Hugh Morgan, you know, you'll see that as much as a talking dog. It doesn't happen much.

ROGER ATKIN: Well, I agree with David. We have got to think differently and think of new ways about how we engage the unemployed, how we engage the business people into the resources sector given where it is going and what is happening. We just, see the old system of recruitment, employment and training was creaking and basically not working before this boom.

The added pressure that has happened with this massive capital expenditure is just breaking the system so we do need to sit down collectively, as Dave was saying - unions, government, communities especially and the resources companies - to work out how we are going to make the best of this.

EMILY BOURKE: That Roger Atkin is from the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy, and before that Dave Noonan from the CFMEU and demographer Bernard Salt.subbed

EMILY BOURKE: It's a policy that's been labelled "lunacy" in some quarters and "a reprehensible betrayal" in others and detractors have been labelled "xenophobic".

Either way, the heated debate over bringing foreign workers into Australia to work on mega mining projects shows no sign of cooling down.

The Prime Minister is demanding miners share the wealth, while others in the Labor movement are demanding a fair share of jobs for local workers.

The bottom line is that the mining sector needs around 100,000 extra workers over the next five years. The demand for skilled labour is unprecedented and it's not going away.

Trouble is, the normal market mechanisms can't keep up and many Australians don't and won't move to the mining areas - certainly not in the numbers that are needed.

To discuss the sticking points and possible solutions, I spoke to demographer Bernard Salt, Roger Atkin is from the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy and Dave Noonan from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.

Roger Atkin, if I can begin with you. You are from the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy which works with industry to develop their workforce now and in the future and assists young people to start their careers in the resources sector so if you are doing your job, why do we need overseas workers?

ROGER ATKIN: The level investment firm going on just in Queensland let alone around Australia is phenomenal. We've known nothing like it. Yes we want to employ local people and young local people especially but really the supply of skilled people willing to move to the sort of places where the investment is, is very limited. If we don't do this then these major projects which are going to keep Australian going for generations to come just won't get built.

EMILY BOURKE: Bernard Salt, there is suggestions in today's media that the problem is that Australians lack initiative. What are the figures, why won't people move?

BERNARD SALT: Well, in fact Australians have had a great history of labour mobility. We are very happy to move from Victoria to New South Wales to Queensland, particularly to the south-east corner of Queensland and reverse. We'll move north-south along the eastern seaboard but we have for generations had a problem with moving from the east to the west.

In any one year the largest number of people from the east that will move to the west is 7,000. That is total population. That probably makes about a 3,000 person contribution to the workforce. The issue is that the number of people coming into Western Australia from overseas can range up to 48,000 so there is about, people are six times more likely to come into Western Australia from across the Indian Ocean than from across the Nullarbor Plain.

I argue that the Nullarbor Plain is a little bit like a Berlin Wall - it keeps the people from the east from getting into the west.

EMILY BOURKE: Dave Noonan, the union is grappling with a difficult manufacturing sector and there is so many displaced workers in that field, can you simply pick up workers from western Sydney and suburban Melbourne and plonk them in the Pilbara?

DAVE NOONAN: If we look at the real situation in terms of the enterprise migration agreement which was announced last week, it actually deals not with skilled or trades workers and above, it is actually about a minimum of 1,700 workers in what are called semi-skilled areas. This means riggers, scaffolders, crane drivers, plant operators and first of all I think it needs to be understood that the training period of time to train people to those callings is not the same as it is to put someone through a four year apprenticeship.

It is also the case that as we are informed, the likely source countries of labour for these jobs is China, Indonesia and the Philippines. None of those countries have the sort of vocational trading systems that provide the legally certified requirements for those callings.

So my point is that those workers are coming from overseas will need to be trained and certified to work in Australia in any event.

We now turn to the situation in Western Australia and in the south-west regions of Perth itself which includes the Kwinana Strip - youth unemployment runs at around 27 per cent. That is not well known and I think it is often missed in this debate.

Of course we have long standing and endemic Indigenous unemployment and lots of other high unemployment areas in regional Australia.

I think the other thing that is important and as originally a Western Australian who lives in Melbourne, I can say I have crossed the Nullarbor a few times and I certainly understand the difficulty that people have in relocating but I think it is possibly a little colourful to refer to it as the Berlin Wall. I am not aware of anyone being shot for trying to cross it yet.

EMILY BOURKE: Roger Atkin, if I can ask you, the unions are clearly concerned about wages and working conditions and substandard skill sets, can they be guaranteed? Are you concerned about the quality of the skills that might be coming in?

ROGER ATKIN: There is always the question of that but I think the enterprise agreement is robust enough to ensure that that will happen and in fact our information on it certainly in the Queensland Resources Council is that a lot of these people will be coming from Canada but again I acknowledge there the point David made that some of the unemployment figures but you have got to remember in this country there is not a labour shortage, there is a skill shortage and unless we can get our act together and really invest in the future of our skills, we are going to facing this sort of thing constantly.

EMILY BOURKE: Dave Noonan, if I can ask you if this migration arrangement can create permanent jobs for other Australians for the long term, why not embrace a short-term guest worker scheme?

DAVE NOONAN: Because of the way it is currently been designed. Now first of all the union always has had a view that there is a need for a very balanced skilled migration scheme in Australia. I've seen some of the figures from the mining industry suggesting that the union movement is xenophobic and my union is a multicultural union. We are made up of workers from all over the world and I haven't seen very many people from the mining employers with the long history of opposition to apartheid and involvement with the apartheid struggle, the support for land rights, speaking out against the demonisation of refugees as my union and I have done for years and years and years.

So the xenophobic thing, I just wanted to raise and say that it is a little rich to read from a newspaper like The Australian and some of the people who are commentating about xenophobia, it is opportunistic smear which is there to avoid dealing with the real issue.

Now turning to your question I think that there will be some need for skilled temporary migration programs. We have a view that permanent migration, permanent skilled migration is a better solution in balance but there is no doubt, I mean I think there is $170 billion of resources work at the moment that they are going to be some skill shortages but what is not the solution is to have a situation where we have an announcement about semi-skilled workers such a large number, not capped at 1,700 by the way under the EMA, and we have a situation where people with precisely those skills already can't get on.

I mean a major employer, Program Maintenance, on the 7.30 Report the other night made the point that they had advertised for 80 workers for a resource project and received 4,500 applications. Every time an apprenticeship is advertised in the construction, resources or engineering sector, they are swamped with applicants. I certainly agree…

EMILY BOURKE: So what is the obstacle?

DAVE NOONAN: Well, I think that there has been an unwillingness to take on the load of training and I think that that has got to be done. I think that we have to actually really make the priority of training the next generation of young Australians in construction resources an absolute priority.

ROGER ATKIN: If I'd just might make a point about that. I think the biggest barrier actually to bringing on young people and green skins generally if you look at people with no experience of the industry is the capacity to train them and make them safe on the workplace. This is part of the reason why you have this difficulty in getting young people and new people into the industry. Every single one of them that I know that I work with would much rather have a local person working for them with the skills than trying to bring them in from overseas which is a really high cost option for them but if that is all there is then that's all there is.

EMILY BOURKE: Bernard Salt, if I can ask you, this debate has taken on a racial tone. How do you explain that and can the heat be taken out of it?

BERNARD SALT: Generally I think Australians are very, have been very accepting of multiculturalism of a significant migrant contribution to the Australian nation but I do think in tough times that people might over react. I don't see it as a uniquely Australian trait, I think it is something that applies to any community when there are straightened times that people are facing.

EMILY BOURKE: Well Chris Bowen says there are between 10 and 30 other similar agreements under discussion and the reliance on foreign workers isn't new. This has been happening in the health sector for some time. Bernard Salt do you see any drawbacks to this model?

BERNARD SALT: Well, I suppose it comes down to the devil be in the detail as Dave I think has alluded to. That at face value as long as those positions are first offered to Australian workers and if the positions cannot be filled because people don't want to move to the west or for whatever reason then it is an insurance policy for the investors who say at least we know that there is a fallback position, that we will be able to get the labour and the skills.

EMILY BOURKE: Dave Noonan, the Government has pointed to a jobs board that will ensure that local workers get first dibs on the job. It has been described as a political fig leaf. Does a jobs board allay your concerns?

DAVE NOONAN: I wrote to Minister Evans asking for a jobs board 18 months ago and just to address Bernard's concern about the timing, the Construction and Resource Unions have been engaged in a dialogue with the Government about this issue for all of that time. In particular we have sought some undertaking and reassurance that there would be proper labour market testing. In other words there would be a process by which local workers would be sought and if they were unable to be got in the correct skills then we would look at temporary overseas labour with appropriate protections. Now the appropriate protections are problematic. The number of visits by the Immigration Department to 457 employer sponsors over the year 2010/11 decreased by 50 per cent. Only 4 per cent were audited. That is a problem and we are aware of widespread exploitation in this area.

In terms of the jobs board, we think it is a very good start but it needs to be properly utilised, it needs to be properly set up. We've now seen some action from the Government on that space but at the point of time of the announcement of the EMA on the Friday there was certainly a lack of guarantees around this.

EMILY BOURKE: Roger Atkin, speaking from industry what are your thoughts on the guaranteeing of workers' safety and the conditions?

ROGER ATKIN: Look, he's right, it's something that needs to be monitored. I believe we're in a stage now with our companies where they are very, very keen to look after all their workers...

EMILY BOURKE: Is that just lip service?

ROGER ATKIN: I don't think so. I think it's an economic reality.

EMILY BOURKE: Some of these areas though in outback regional areas, they are inhospitable places and there are a lot of problems with fly-in fly-out workers and that model. It can be a pretty miserable existence - what can companies and governments do to improve the lives of workers and their families?

ROGER ATKIN: Well certainly a lot of the companies, and I'm speaking at a general level here, invest heavily into their communities in housing in their communities.

The reality is though if they need, for example, an electrician and that electrician lives, again an example, on the Gold Coast and the kids are at school there, they've got their home there, they've got everything there, their sense of community is there, they're not going to move and uproot the whole family to go to the Mooloolabas or Dysarts of the world, or even the Mt Isas but they still want to participate in the industry, and the industry still wants them. So, for many workers, FIFO is - fly-in fly-out - is an appropriate and a workable response.

EMILY BOURKE: There was an example of Rio Tinto several years ago going to South Australia in the wake of a whole lot of jobs going from Mitsubishi and approaching retrenched workers and saying would you like to come to the WA mining towns and they said no.

BERNARD SALT: And the fact is that some people will and some people won't. Some people have got personal and family circumstances, there are age, there are a whole lot of reasons as to why people may want to fly-in fly-out or actually uproot and move but if we have a situation where even in the suburbs of Perth as I said before, we have got youth unemployment at 27 per cent, if we've got entrenched Indigenous unemployment and other unemployment in regional areas that are very high and we are not doing a serious job of trying to attack that and I'm not convinced we are at the moment. Even Hugh Morgan this morning...

EMILY BOURKE: Well, indeed if you're right, do we lack initiative?

DAVE NOONAN: The CFMU agreeing with Hugh Morgan, you know, you'll see that as much as a talking dog. It doesn't happen much.

ROGER ATKIN: Well, I agree with David. We have got to think differently and think of new ways about how we engage the unemployed, how we engage the business people into the resources sector given where it is going and what is happening. We just, see the old system of recruitment, employment and training was creaking and basically not working before this boom.

The added pressure that has happened with this massive capital expenditure is just breaking the system so we do need to sit down collectively, as Dave was saying - unions, government, communities especially and the resources companies - to work out how we are going to make the best of this.

EMILY BOURKE: That Roger Atkin is from the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy, and before that Dave Noonan from the CFMEU and demographer Bernard Salt.